For one thing I’m not sure if there’s yet a way to get color textures out of Blender’s procedurals in Luxblend25, as there seems to only be the option to use them as float textures.
But for those up to date on Luxblend25, is there a secret to getting Blender’s procedural textures to show as color textures in Luxrender, because I’m not sure how it can be done and I know from the manual that the procedurals as color textures is possible with the old exporter at least.
Am I missing something or is it not implemented yet?
Also, I’m posting here because I don’t think there’s many Luxblend25 users that frequent the support forums right now (about everything there is about BI), we could use a forum on using Blender for external rendering that would get more traffic than the other software forum.
Not sure what exactly you mean? You wanna assign a simple diffuse map to your model? For using Blender texture types you need to choose the Blender texture type (in the material or texture panel, not sure).
I know how to use the Blender textures, in Luxblend25 there are two types of textures, float textures and color textures (this is also a general paradigm with Luxrender itself)
-Float textures can only be used for things that require floating point values like bump/normal maps
-Color textures can only be used for things that require RGB values like diffuse maps
So far I have only found a way to use Blender procedurals to be used as float textures because I get a warning saying Luxrender can’t find the correct color texture if I try to use it as a diffuse map, but it will find it if I use it as a bumpmap. I wonder if it’s not implemented yet (using them as color textures) because the exporter does not yet have an option in the texture UI to give the Blender procedural texture a color.
I can’t help you, but please, you can help me: what combination of blender25 and luxblend25 / luxrender are you using? since i’ve encountered big problems in making it work.
Download the exporter framework from here (the button should be near the top when the site is working properly, get the compressed archive that works best like .zip) http://github.com/doughammond/exporterframework
-Unzip the first two files (the next instructions are recommended to be done by copying & pasting the folders)
-From the Exporter framework archive, find the ‘ef’ folder and put it in the 'io folder that came with the Blender build
-Find the ‘Luxrender’ folder in the Luxblend25 archive and put it where ‘ef’ is
-Select ‘Luxrender’ in the top menu of the Blender build
-Set the file path to the folder the Lux application and all associated stuff is in
-Set your output path to a valid folder, otherwise Luxrender won’t run
-Select the ‘Run Renderer’ checkbox
Okay, I found out how after looking in some corner of the Lux forum that included a changelog for Version 0.7. You make color textures out of float values using the Mix texture (and now I’ve found this is also how you invert bumpmaps as well:))